History in the Era of Massive Data

Abstract This article draws on the experience of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) research project, ``\#ww1 the centenary of the Great War on Twitter,'' to contemplate what it means to use born-digital and big data primary sources, both as a methodology and as a contribution to the field of memory studies and contemporary history more broadly. It discusses the notion of distant reading in order to show the interest of multiscale reading in the framework of big data. It also elaborates upon the use of reflexive thinking in terms of what we really study when using this kind of primary source materials (tweets and, more generally, feeds of borndigital sources), namely: temporalities and information circulation.